Meters evolve to bring the smart grid home

The arrival of the truly connected digital home is one of the most anticipated events of the coming decade, promising tremendous opportunities across multiple markets. With stakeholders as diverse as consumer electronics manufacturers, connectivity solution providers, governmental agencies, utility companies and semiconductor suppliers, it is not surprising that there is a diversity of views on which direction the digital home should take.

Current stakeholders are looking to maintain existing business models, while new entrants see the connected home as an opportunity to create new revenue streams with products and services. Expect the digital home to be a battleground for years to come.

Many essentials, elemental building blocks are required to achieve the connected digital home. In the smart energy realm, the shift from mechanical meters to electronic meters is well under way.

Adding remote communications and automated service applications is the popular view of smart energy. The next envisioned frontier is the implementation of time-of-use plans, based on existing infrastructure and generation facilities. That limited vision, however, misses the opportunity to revolutionize the entire system, from power generation and distribution to effective energy consumption management.

"Smart meters will allow you to actually monitor how much energy your family is using by the month, by the week, by the day, or even by the hour," President Obama said in October 2009 during a speech in support of Recovery Act funding for smart grid technology. "Coupled with other technologies, this is going to help you manage your electricity use and your budget at the same time, allowing you to converse electricity during times when prices are highest."

That's a good starting point, but it will have no real impact on efficiency or consumption rates. Without fundamental energy generation and distribution innovation, consumers' behavior is unlikely to change in any significant way. Standardization and dynamic pricing are required to make it worthwhile for energy providers and consumers to monitor usage at so granular level.

The current, monopoly-driven infrastructure, however, is so inefficient that energy measurement and monitoring provide little opportunity for savings.

To achieve the benefits envisioned for the smart grid, full standards-based deployment is required.

A fully deployed smart grid will create a competitive energy service environment, with multiple providers and dynamic pricing, much as the telecom revolution has broadened customers' options over the past 25 years. A standards-based approach to supplying consumers' energy needs will drive investment in next-generation technologies and business models oriented to demographic profiles that match the efficiency generation profiles.

For example, people who work from home and consume a majority of their energy during the day may be offered an attractive package from an energy distributor partnered with a solar power generation company.

Smart Meters appropriately employed in distribution systems of power deficit, developing countries where certain sections of people are given power at a subsidy or no cost will greatly help in managing the available resources. While I concur with the view above, time of day metering and tariff greatly helps the utilities to optimally utilize the generating resources. One can always set a timer for washing machine or dryer to use power in lower tariff time zone. Dynamic billing like the tariff changes by minute is meaningless and would create only confusion for user and business for IT companies and semiconductor companies.

I fully agree with you that smart metering is unlikely to change electricity consumption habits.
If you want to watch TV you want to do it when the popcorn is hot. You won't get up at 3 am to get better rates.
But the people pushing Smart Grid etc in Congress are not bothered with reality. If they get pressured enough, and the voters start saying they want it, then Smart Grid will be forced onto the populace whether it makes sense or not.
If that happens there is going to be a huge market that many people want to profit from.

"Smart grid" is a buzz word of the current decade. It is used by politicians and all the sales people types. The only trouble is that it means nothing... There's no single definition of what the smart grid is... We have a feeling that it has something to do with renewables, dynamic tariffs and so on but how do you actually imagine that? I am very afraid that in our pursuit of getting thing working better we actually can make it worse.
Just imagine having one of those "smart" meters (why the ...beep... is everything called smart these days?), right? Your tariffs are changing during the day, whenever the sun goes up and wind starts blowing. Now you as a concerned citizen (concerned with your bill) spend half of the day looking at your meter and waiting for price to go down to start your washing. How will you get billed? Will it be something like:
10.3 kWh @ $0.15 (from 01/01/2020 10:15 to 10:17)
1.77 kWh @ $0.147 (from 01/01/2020 10:17 to 10:21)
.... and so on, the list goes through 200 pages....
And what if you say "I do not agree! I remember looking at the meter from 10:17 and it was showing $0.13!!!". Will there be any log available on the net? This thing becomes so complicated that NOBODY will ever be able to use it. Maybe it is actually the point. You'll just stop controlling your bill (because you'll never understand it) or maybe you'll hire a company to put an automation in place that would "lower your bill". From the history we know that very often when we start complicating things the outcome is quite different.
Why not have one tariff for all and just allow people to generate some amount of energy that might offset their use? One meter, on tariff. If your roof is filled with solar panels and you get a lot of sun, the meter spins the other way. Simple, efficient, understandable for all. The only problem is that it may not be so profitable for the semiconductor companies and all the new industry that might be build around it.